This invention relates to tabbed index dividers, business cards, Rolodex.RTM. cards, holiday or greeting cards, uneven sheets and the like and particularly those for use in three-ring or similar notebooks. It also concerns methods for printing on them by feeding them through standard laser or ink jet printers, photocopiers or other common printing apparatus.
The width of a standard index tab divider for a three-ring notebook containing sheets of pre-punched 81/2 by eleven inch notebook paper is nine by eleven inches, which includes the width of the tab. Unfortunately, many standard laser-jet or ink-jet printers or photocopiers can only accept rectangular sheets of widths not exceeding 81/2 inches. Accordingly, there has been a need for an assembly and accompanying method for conveniently printing upon the face and tab portion of a nine by eleven inch divider using a laser or ink-jet printer or photocopier which has an 81/2 inch width restriction.
One approach has been to print on a standard 81/2 by eleven inch sheet and then adhere a pre-punched spine strip along an edge of the sheet. The sheet can then be inserted into a ringed binder. However, this arrangement is somewhat inconvenient to a user for two reasons. First, for assemblies in which the spine strips are entirely separate from the divider sheets, the user must separately store both components, and storage areas can become cluttered and the spine strips misplaced. Second, the user must very carefully attach the pre-punched spine strip to the divider sheet. If the spine strip is misaligned, the user must reposition the strip or may even need to discard the entire assembly, particularly if a permanent pressure sensitive adhesive is used on the spine. Additionally, this arrangement is somewhat user-unfriendly due to the time it takes to remove a release liner from the spine strip and apply the spine strip to the divider.
Common printers and copiers may have a thickness restriction as well as a width restriction, due to interior clearances and due to the radii of bends in the sheet path through those machines. Uneven thicknesses can cause skewing in the transport of sheets through the printer and possibly jamming. It is therefore important to minimize nonuniformity of thickness over the entire assembly. Holmberg, U.S. Pat. No. 4,447,481 teaches that assemblies for feeding into common printers should have a substantially uniform thickness. (This patent and all other patents, publications and patent applications mentioned anywhere in this disclosure are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties.)
Different brands of software are currently available and others are being developed for causing laser, ink-jet and other printers to automatically print the desired indicia directly on tabs of dividers. The dividers can be approximately 81/4 inches by eleven inches when folded before printing and unfold the standard nine inches by eleven inches after printing, as described in the above-mentioned '370 application. They are typically constructed of medium weight paper reinforced along one longitudinal edge by an adhered layer of plastic film. This edge may include three through-holes or apertures for filing the divider in a ring binder. Extending out from the opposite edge is a tab, having a length of about 11/4 inch to 17/8 inch (or 11/8 inch to 31/4 inches) and a width of one-half inch and which may be reinforced with an adhered layer of plastic film. The tabs on different dividers in a set are typically provided at between three to eight different positions.
In the past when such dividers were fed (in the portrait direction of the divider sheet) using multipurpose or cassette trays into ink-jet, electrophotographic or laser printers, the dividers tended to skew as they entered the printer. This skewing occurs because (1) the tabs of the dividers stick out one-half inch from the body of the paper and thus do not provide full continuous contact of each divider to the paper guide of the (multipurpose) printer tray and (2) the paper guide of the multipurpose tray is much shorter than the paper divider itself. This means that the dividers with the last few tab positions do not contact the paper guide, specifically, the fourth and fifth tabs of a five tab set and the fifth through eighth tabs of an eight tab set.
Even when an insert feed tray as described in copending U.S. application Ser. No. 08/511,879 ('879), filed Aug. 4, 1995, is used, a perfectly straight feed in the portrait direction may not result. In fact, that insert feed tray works perfectly with only about one half of the printers. For example, it does not work well with vertical feed trays and with the older HPII and HPIII printers where the insert tray tends to move around a bit causing shifting of the print and skewing. The tray tends to move around when it is only 81/4 inches wide and the cassette tray is 81/2 inches. A two-sided insert tray works better in that situation.
Within the past year a new office printer--the Hewlett Packard 4V printer--has been made available. The HP4V printer is a high speed, network shared printer adapted for office use. Unlike prior printers, except a few used in the graphic arts business for large format printing, the HP4V printer handles sheets as wide as eleven inches. It thus allows 81/2 by eleven inch sheets to be fed therein in the landscape direction. Thus, 81/2 by eleven inch tabbed divider sheets can be fed in tabbed edge or binding edge first. And the available software allows the printer to print both along the tab and across the body of the sheet in a single pass through the printer.
A problem, however, is that unless the tab of the sheet happens to be aligned with the printer's start-of-the-page sensor, the sheet, if fed in tab edge first (or sheet edge first with a trailing tab), will not be detected or sensed and will not be fed into the printer for a printing operation thereon. More accurately, the tab will not be sensed and printing on the tab does not occur. The HP4V printer has center sensors to sense the beginning and trailing edges of the paper. Thus, for the HP4V printer when a five-position tabbed divider system is used, only the dividers with their tabs in the third position will be sensed for printing on the tabs when fed in tab edge first (or as a divider with a third-position trailing tab). That is, those dividers whose tabs are in the first, second, fourth and fifth positions do not cause the tabs to be sensed for printing thereon. Thus, the divider must be fed in a hole punched side first, on the side opposite the tab. Also, if the dividers are fed in binding (hole punched) edge first, all of the sheets are fed through, but only the ones with the tabs near the center would be printed. That is, for sheets having uncentered tabs, the printer will not sense the trailing edge and print on the tab.